The Natural Language and Information Processing (NLIP) Research Group works on a wide range of topics in Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

Research in NLIP has been carried out in the
Computer Laboratory for over fifty years. The earliest work, by
Roger Needham and Karen Sparck Jones, was on automatic thesaurus
construction.
Subsequent research by Karen Sparck Jones during the
1960s and 70s focused on statistical approaches to retrieval and
included innovative work on term weighting.

In 1985 the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language
Processing
began, continuing very successfully
to become the MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology,
which has now been merged with the MPhil in Advanced Computer Science.

The group has continued to grow
with an increasing number of teaching staff,
post-doctoral researchers,
research students and a wide range of
projects covering most areas of language processing.